2010-04-22

This one isn't really about Dr. Helen or Insty - even though the joke about therapists "enhancing soft totalitarianism" calls to me like a siren. A siren of laughing at Insty's erectile dysfunction.

No, this is about the linked ShrinkWrapped post titled, I kid you not, The SovietizIng of American Therapy. Damned Reds, they're worse than zombies! Communists are gonna get you in your therapy sessions!

Haha - but Red Menace aside, what's the problem with the post? I mean the basic idea that psychotherapists and psychoanalysts ought to keep their politics out of their work is a good one. Uncontroversial, something that conservatives and leftsists should be able to agree on. People coming to you for professional help in addressing mental health issues - not a good place to be talking politics or evangelizing your political stance.

Here's the thing:

(I am using Homosexuality as an example because it exemplified how our blind spots led us to become agents of social engineering; this was as problematic on the Conservative end of the spectrum as it is now on the Liberal side of the ledger. The advantage of taking a more Libertarian approach in one's Therapy as it doesn't require any particular imperative to impose one's own weltanschauung on one's patients.)

WOW. So much of FAIL in such a small space. Maybe too much - maybe if we take it in small bits, it'll be more manageable.

Homosexuality. Maybe I should have quoted the couple sentences before to give context, but my artistic sense felt that them round brackets constituted a whole. Here's the context - previously Homosexuality (you have to capitalize it!) was categorized as "a diagnosable, deviant sexual orientation". To ShrinkWrapped's credit, this is identified as wrong, but then in a feat of contortion so breathtakingly ridiculous he states that psychiatry has over-compensated by identifying homophobia as a disorder. SRSLY. Apparently considering folks with an irrational hatred of gays as mentally ill is just as bad as categorizing homosexuality as some sort of disease.

But wait, there's more! After clearly stating the issue - blind spots leading mental health professionals to engaging in social engineering - he drops the bomb, that Libertarianism is the special case exception to the rule of "no politics in therapy".

Wow. I think I've made my point about the sheer density of wrong in that excerpt - even if the first bit required additional contextual build-up.

So, we've got EPIC-scale hypocrisy in that politicizing psychiatry is wrong for everyone except for Libertarians. Because of the megalomaniacal I-can-do-no-wrong-ness of what must be the objective fact that Libertarianism is always good. It's a good thing that Libertarians are immune to the Narcissist's "unconscious grandiosity".

Then there's the tragically dangerous aspect of a psychoanalyst who appears to honest believe that it's okay for him to let his politics seep into his work. Wait, that last bit should have gone first, or maybe with a "more importantly" - because, wow. As much as this dick is a dick that needs to be laughed at, there's real potential for harm for pateints and that's more important than mockery.

Unfortunately, I can't do anything about that - as mockery is pretty much my stock-in-trade (that and yelling PENIS). So back to the mockery.

Remember that bit about blind spots and social engineering? Reading that excerpt you get the sense that ShrinkWrapped is suggesting that Libertarianism isn't just non-harmful to psychiatry, but is a good foundation to build therapy on. Surely no one can be so un-self-aware and so very very dim as to be able to embody the exact thing they are railing against.

OMFG! It's way worse than that. You have to read the next paragraph for proof - and there's no way I'm quoting it since I've already messed up my previous "in such a small space" claim. Suffice to say that ShrinkWrapped doesn't believe that advocating Libertarianism to patients is good for the patients - apparently that's just a delightful side effect of defeating the forces of Totalitarianism. That's right, using one's position as a psychiatrist to proselytize for the FYIGM lifestyle is an act of immunizing the population from authoritarian take-over. It's not only what's best for the patient, but more imprtantly it's what's best for society.

See the article: "Liberal Progressive Muggers."DKW and his commentors are all busy people, too busy to be following some random link to some random webpage, except the ones that promise photographs of DKW's mum. So if you have a point to make about social engineering from the Left or the Right, you'd be better off spelling it out here -- preferably succinctly, for in addition to our busyness we have short attention spans.